The Millions Interview: Roxana Saberi

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Last year, not long after Barack Obama’s inauguration, reports trickled into the US of an American journalist working in Tehran who had been arrested and detained. The details of what Roxana Saberi was experiencing in Evin prison, Iran’s own version of the Ministry of Love, were not reported. But her name would appear in the headlines a few more times in the next few months. By April she had been sentenced to eight years in prison for espionage. By May, after a significant international outcry, she was released on a two-year suspended sentence for a lesser charge.

It’s hard to think of another possible victim the Iranian regime could have chosen better calculated to elicit the sympathies of the West. Saberi, 33, was raised by a Japanese mother and Iranian father in Fargo and has the poise befitting her status as a former Miss North Dakota. She’s studied at Northwestern and Cambridge, and having learned Farsi, she has written a series of reports for a variety of outlets, including NPR and Fox News, often about the least discussed aspects of Iranian life. (In one report, she described the country’s relatively enlightened handling of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.)

In her new memoir Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran, Saberi details her experiences in Evin prison. You have probably heard of or read more disturbing accounts of torture at the hands of an authoritarian regime. Saberi was not beaten. Her bones were not broken. Other prisoners experienced more obvious forms of torture at Evin prison before and during her time there. But Saberi was subjected instead to what human rights groups now refer to as “white” torture, a series of brutal psychological offenses designed to break victims.

With her new book, and accompanying speaking tour, Saberi has become a spokeswoman for human rights. Her schedule at the moment is extremely busy, but she did have some time in the last few weeks to answer some questions by email.

The Millions: In the final pages of your book, you call the kind of torture you experienced in Evin prison “white” torture. You were not beaten or physically mutilated. But you were subject to inhumane threats, solitary confinement and psychological torture. Perhaps you can explain the concept of “white” torture better than I have done here. And maybe you could also explain whether or not you believe it should be considered as much a human rights abuse as the better-known, more medieval techniques.

Roxana Saberi: You explained white torture quite well. White torture does not leave any physical marks on the body but can devastate one’s mind and conscience. It often involves psychological pressures and threats; a combination of isolation, intimidation and manipulation; and the denial of a prisoner’s basic rights (such as access to attorneys and family members).

White torture can also rob prisoners of their self dignity and honor, especially when they are coerced to make statements – oftentimes false – about themselves or others. One aim of this use of white torture seems to be to make prisoners break so they will stop resisting in later stages of interrogation.

Many prisoners experience white torture, and they should not become complacent when they are not subjected to black, or physical, torture, (accounts of which are not uncommon in Iran.) Both involve the violation of human rights.

TM: At a couple of points in your book, your Iranian interrogators reference the violations of human rights at Guantanamo Bay. That your own democratic government has been responsible for abuses even worse than what you yourself suffered in Evin prison does not make your own suffering any less outrageous. But has the behavior of the U.S. in the past decade made your relatively new role as a spokesperson against human rights abuses in Iran more difficult?

RS: My captors tried to use Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo against me, as if attempting to justify their treatment of me (and other prisoners like me). I believe any time the United States does not reflect those principles of freedom and justice that others expect of it, this can be exploited by people like my captors who instead of correcting their own behavior, make excuses for it and gain more fuel to criticize America.

I can give you another example: One day, my father was called into the Tehran Revolutionary Court. An intelligence official there asked him something like, “Why do you keep telling the news media that your daughter is innocent? Don’t you know she has made a confession?”

My father said, “But we must see under what conditions she made it,” (implying that I was coerced into making a false confession).

The official replied, “We spoke to her in a completely friendly atmosphere. This isn’t America. We don’t waterboard here.”

I realize there have been some efforts made to address certain shortcomings of America’s human rights’ behaviors, and I hope that wherever human rights’ violations take place in the world, they will be addressed.

TM: You discuss your mother’s problems marrying your father, due to Japanese society’s allergy to relationships between its own nationals and foreigners. But you do not mention any viciously racist attitudes, either from your Iranian interrogators or from ordinary Iranians, directed at you for your Japanese heritage. Did you leave these details out or is this a sign of a more enlightened feature of Iranian society we in the West may not know so much about?

RS: I do not recall facing any racism in Iran because of my Japanese heritage, either from my captors or from ordinary Iranians. Many ordinary Iranians admire the Japanese people for their work ethic and discipline and see them as very warm and polite. It wasn’t uncommon for me to encounter Iranian taxi drivers who had lived and worked in Japan some years ago, and some of them spoke Japanese quite well. Some Iranian men had also, like my father, married Japanese women.

(Also, my mother’s parents’ opposition to her marrying my father because he was a foreigner seems to be less common in Japan today.)

TM: The motives of your interrogators remain, at the end of your book, unclear. Were they holding you up as an example to reformist journalists in Iran? Was your detention a kind of “saber-rattling” on the part of the Iranian government against the U.S?

RS: I cannot be sure of the reasons behind my arrest. They could have included the two you listed, as well as others.

After I recanted my false confession, my main interrogator essentially told me he knew I was not a spy (something that the deputy prosecutor implied to me – in private, of course). My captors may have wanted to use my false confession to intimidate Iranians advocating better relations with the West (at a time when President Obama was talking about more engagement with Iran, which many Iranian hardliners do not want). They may have also wanted my false confession to reinforce their claim that America had planted spies throughout Iran to bolster their argument for more controls on society and to silence criticism in the name of protecting national security.

Moreover, my captors had also demanded I spy for them, and they seemed truly resentful of the fact that I had interviewed many Iranians for a book that I wanted to publish abroad, beyond their censoring range.

TM: Throughout your book you maintain a tone of bewilderment. Having lived in Iran for six years prior to your arrest, what had you experienced in the country that made your experiences in prison so shocking?

RS: I knew some journalists and others who had been routinely questioned for a few hours about their work, then released. I believed if the authorities had questions about my work on the book I was writing at the time, which I went about quite openly to ensure them I had nothing to hide, they would do the same with me. I had also traveled in and out of the country many times during the six years I lived in Iran, and I had never been interrogated at the airport or had my passport revoked there, as the authorities had done with many others in the past.

I knew that in previous years, Iran’s Intelligence Ministry had begun detaining prominent dual-national activists and academics, but they had been primarily dealing with politically charged ideas or exchanges of intellectuals, writers and civil-society activists. I had known several others (including a few dual nationals) in Iran who had written books on the country without being arrested. I had never heard of someone being accused of using a book as a cover to spy on Iran.

I also did not realize that even though my captors eventually more or less acknowledged to me they knew from the start that I wasn’t a spy, that they would still accuse me of being one. Unfortunately, when the Iranian authorities want to fabricate charges and make a political case against someone, they do.

TM: Your arrest nearly coincided with President Barack Obama’s inauguration. You were reporting in Iran during the very long presidential election season we experienced in the U.S. How exactly is our new president perceived in Iran? That his name does not appear much in your book seems to be a sign that the average Iranian is relatively indifferent to his election. Am I wrong?

RS: He was inaugurated only 11 days before my arrest, so there was not a lot of time for me to understand Iranians’ reactions to his work as president. However, as I mentioned in the book, after he was elected, many ordinary Iranians believed that there was more hope for their country to have better relations with America (something that most Iranians want).

The views of those in power were mixed. As my main interrogator told me in one interrogation session, “America’s Democrats are more dangerous than Republicans,” and that even if the threat of a U.S. military attack on Iran appeared to have subsided under President Obama, Washington would intensify its “soft warfare” to try to overthrow the regime. My interrogator’s words reflected the view of many hard-line Iranian leaders who believe that better relations with America is either not possible or not desirable.

Later in the book, however, I mentioned that I began seeing on state-run TV (which I was allowed to watch after some weeks) reports suggesting that various Iranian officials were hinting at the possibility of better relations with the United States.

TM: Your lawyer Abdolsamad Khorramshahi is something of an elusive figure. At first, you seem suspicious of his motives. Do you now know what they were? And why did he refuse to work with another lawyer?

RS: I still cannot be sure of his motives, but he (in addition to the second lawyer I was stuck with) must have been under at least some pressure by the Iranian authorities to refrain from acting fully in my interests. (Khorramshahi kept telling me, “I’m under a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure,” without going into details.)

He told my father and me he refused to work with another lawyer because he couldn’t work with anyone else—that he would only work alone. This put me in a very difficult position, especially when I realized that he was not defending me as effectively and courageously as I wished.

TM: Has the guilt you experienced for making your forced confession abated? After reading about the demand of your interrogator that you smile and wave around your arms more during the confession, it is hard to believe that anyone could have taken it seriously.

RS: I still have some guilt for various statements I was forced to make and repeat on video (several times) under pressure. Some human rights’ activists and former political prisoners have told me not to be so hard on myself, that many others in my position have succumbed to the same pressures. What my captors coerced me to do in prison is part of the “white torture” whose effects leave psychological scars, not only for me but also for others who have gone through something similar. However, writing about my experiences in Between Two Worlds and talking about them have been helping me heal because I think it’s important that people know what happened to me is happening to so many others today.

TM: When you are let out of prison you describe a newfound celebrity within Iran. A shopkeeper sells “Roxana” scarves, like the blue one you wore in newspaper photographs. Your story seemed to plant at least one of the seeds for the Green Revolution that occurred not long after your release.

RS: I believe that the roots of the “Green Movement” (if we define it is as a movement for more democracy and human rights in Iran) were planted long before my detention. In fact, the movement for democracy in Iran dates back to more than 100 years ago.

The warmth that many Iranians showed me upon my release seems indicative of a widespread view in Iran that political prisoners and prisoners of conscience (who are punished simply because of their peaceful pursuit of basic human rights or for their beliefs) have been wrongly imprisoned. They are often respected and admired by many ordinary Iranians who see them as innocent victims punished for standing up for rights that are desired by a large part of the population.

TM: Of all the countries in the Middle East, Iran, in some ways, seems most poised to achieve something like a modern democracy. Its current authoritarian regime is balanced by some democratic features. And last year, we saw the bursting of hunger among Iranian youth for a dramatic change in government. This question may be impossible to answer, but is Iran now Czechoslovakia in 1989 or Hungary in 1956?

RS: As I mentioned above, the struggle for democracy in Iran is not new. There has been a movement for democracy taking place for more than one hundred years, though it has faced opposition from supporters of autocracy.

I believe the majority of Iranians want a more democratic government that respects human rights. Some want changes within the framework of the Islamic Republic; many want a whole new system of government.

One of the factors fueling the wish for a more democratic government is sheer demographics: Around two-thirds of the population is said to be under the age of 30. Many Iranians were either not alive at the time of the revolution or don’t remember it. Many Iranians are in touch with the outside world (through technology, travel, communications, etc.), are aware of universal human rights, and want their rights observed, too. Moreover, more and more women have been attending universities. In recent years, women have come to make up around 65 percent of university entrants. Many have moved from the small towns to big cities to attend college. There, they have been exposed to new ideas, and this has caused many of them to make new demands of their society and the regime.

How long it will take for these demands for democracy to be realized is impossible to predict, (and this also depends on many factors inside and outside the country), but I believe ultimately, they will prevail.

Paul Morton
is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. His working dissertation focuses on the animation industry of the former Yugoslavia. He can be reached via email at [email protected]. You can read his blog My Thought-Dreams here.

When we first opened, a hen came into the store. We stayed calm, though we were thinking, if that chicken gets scared and starts flying around she’s going to poop on our books! Lucky for us, she wandered around, then with some gentle urging, walked out the way she walked in.

Hannah Gersen’s writing has appeared in North American Review, The Southern Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Granta, and The New York Times, and she joined The Millions as a staff writer in 2013. At that time she had recently given birth to her first child, and she was at work on her first novel. It’s being published this month by William Morrow, a major New York house. Which is to say that writerly dreams do come true.
Home Field is set in the fictional town of Willowboro in western Maryland, a stand-in for the town Gersen moved to at the age of 10, after spending her early years in Maine and New Hampshire. The novel opens with teenage Stephanie and her stepfather Dean, the revered coach of the Willowboro High School football team, riding horses in the woods near his father’s Pennsylvania farm. They hear the “mew” of distant sirens. When they get back to the farm, they learn that Stephanie’s mother has hanged herself in one of the barns.
So Home Field is the story of how a man, his stepdaughter and his two young sons deal -- and fail to deal -- with monstrous grief. The novel is also a knowing portrait of how it feels for a girl to come of age, how it feels to live in a suffocating small town, and how difficult it is to see that the love we need most is usually right in front of us, awaiting our embrace. It’s a remarkably assured and un-showy first novel, the work of a young writer with immense poise and immense promise. So go ahead and accuse me of logrolling, but I asked Hannah Gersen if she would be willing to talk about her book, first novelist jitters, and other subjects with a fellow staff writer for The Millions. She agreed, and on a scalding morning we met over iced coffees in the back courtyard of a café near her home in the harborside enclave of Red Hook, Brooklyn.
The Millions: The first thing I want to ask you is, how do you feel right now? Are you having kittens?
Hannah Gersen: I’m really nervous about what people will think. Also, I’ve never had a very big audience before. It’s a much bigger audience than I’ve ever had, so I just don’t know what that will be like.
TM: Are you going to do a book tour?
HG: I’m reading in a couple of places -- in Winchester, Va., in a little bookstore in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I’m going to have a launch party down the street.
TM: Home Field is a family story. It’s about grief, it’s about a death in the family, how people cope with it or don’t cope with it. One of the things that really hit me was the fact that the writing is very un-fussy. I love that. So many first novelists do the “look-Ma-no-hands!” kind of writing. The writing here is very clear and clean. Did that just happen, or was it a conscious decision on your part to tone down the writing?
HG: Pretty conscious. I used to write a little fussier. I reread Anna Kareninaprobably 10 years ago -- I had read it as a teenager and loved it – and I was surprised by how clear and calm the writing is, and there’s so much turmoil in that book. I thought, that’s how I want to write. I wanted that clarity and that calm because it made it easier to write about complicated things.
TM: Your novel is set in a small town in western Maryland. I lived for a time in a small town in Pennsylvania not far from there. You capture the sense of claustrophobia in a small town very beautifully. One of my favorite moments in the novel is when two teenagers are driving down the main street and they look into the video store and see one of their teachers going through the beaded curtain into the Adult section. That was so perfect! There are no secrets in a small town.
HG: You’re so anonymous here in New York, which is great. But I was remembering how different a small town was, how you really know people’s daily lives. As a kid, you see inside people’s houses. You’re babysitting, or you’re visiting your friends’ houses. You just have a much better sense of how other people live.
TM: Along those lines, there were sentences that were wonderful. Let me read a few to you: “Families were so strange. The trivial things you knew, the big things you didn’t. The two getting confused, one masquerading as the other.” That’s really the book, isn’t it?
HG: I was thinking about my own family -- how I know little details about some of my relatives, but there are big holes in their life stories that I just don’t know. As a child you hear bits and pieces, and you put it together later as an adult. I’ve lost a lot of family members over the years, and there are questions I’ll never get to ask.
TM: You were born in Maine and moved to western Maryland as a young girl -- so there is some autobiography in the novel. But it felt like a much bigger story than someone writing about herself. There’s an extended family and school and friends and in-laws, and a grandfather, who’s huge. Tell me about your decisions there.
HG: Moving to Maryland when I was 10 was a big deal. The culture was completely different from New England. Maryland is a mix of North and South, whereas New England is very northern. Northern manners, northern values. I remember the way people spoke to you on the phone in Maryland, it was completely different. In New England you get right to the point. In Maryland you’d have to chit-chat about the weather, how was your day? -- and then you would say what you needed to say.
TM: It also takes half an hour to say goodbye.
HG: Exactly. Also, the emphasis on football was strange to me. My dad is a huge football fan, so it wasn’t completely foreign, but things were different -- the weather, the plant life, the trees. We moved there in the year of the 17-year cicadas, these huge swarms of cicadas, and they’re so noisy -- and I thought, where have I moved? It was almost tropical. But I loved it, too. I loved the wildlife. It was much more rural than where I’d lived.
TM: That was also where you took up long-distance running, which plays a big part in the novel. Did you get serious about it?
HG: Yeah, in middle school my gym teacher said I could be a good runner. Between middle school and high school I made an effort to learn how to run. It was hard and I was really bad the first year.
TM: Going back to small towns, you wrote a wonderful essay for The Millions a while back in defense of being pretentious. The list of things that you said were frowned upon when you were living in that small town in Maryland included “indie rock, foreign films, vegetarian diets, keeping your maiden name, bottled water, wearing black, drinking wine, drinking Starbucks coffee, reading The New York Times and doing yoga.” I laughed out loud when I read that. It sort of dates you because, as you said in the essay, those things are a lot more acceptable in small towns today. But that list tells about a time and a place. That was real, wasn’t it?
HG: Definitely. I remember this girl, she’d moved from a nice suburb in Maryland and she was carrying bottled water, and people thought it was so strange and pretentious. It’s so funny because now everyone carries bottled water everywhere.
TM: Speaking of indie rock, another thing I loved about the novel was the musical references. There’s a playlist at the back of the book where you talk about your reasons for including certain songs. Sometimes, in the novel, you just mention the artist and sometimes you mention specific song titles. Why did you include the music?
HG: Stephanie is a teenage character, and music is so important when you’re a teenager. Maybe I’m biased but I feel like music was really good in the early- to mid-'90s, in terms of rock music. Hip-hop was also interesting then, but that wasn’t really my thing.
TM: You were more into Tori Amos. She’s in the book.
HG: Yeah, and I knew it would be important to Stephanie and for other kids, too. I don’t know how kids listen to music now, but buying music, hanging out at stores, trading mix-tapes and CDs -- it was a big way of making friends.
TM: You just wrote an essay for The Millions likening Bill Cunningham, the great street photographer for The New York Times, who just died -- likening him to Proust. You wrote that Cunningham saw “the sublime in the everyday.” You’re a big Proust fan. Did you always think of Bill Cunningham as a Proust acolyte, or did that only come to you after he died?
HG: I’ve been reading Proust all year, and I’ve been noticing how good Proust was on clothing. I do think that Bill Cunningham’s sensibility about clothes was similar to Proust’s. He’s interested in how people wear clothes, and how it suits an individual, and how clothes express a time and place. He’s not about trends or celebrity. Proust wasn’t either. He viewed clothes as beautiful decoration -- and expression.
TM: In your essay you mention Bill Cunningham talking about “summer fox,” that women in the 1920s wore fox collars in the summertime. Obviously he knew his history. That makes him a little Proust-like, doesn’t it?
HG: I think so. I was thinking he was probably familiar with some of the fashions that Proust wrote about.
TM: Tell me about how Home Field came to be. Did you work on it for 50 years, or did it come pretty quick?
HG: I started working on it when I was pregnant with my son. I didn’t have an easy pregnancy, so I didn’t make a lot of progress until after my son was born, in August of 2012. Then when my son was three or four months old I started writing again. Because I could only work on it when I had child care, I worked at a very steady pace, 15 hours a week pretty much. That actually worked pretty well because I had to step away from it.
TM: That’s not a bad thing, is it?
HG: No. I finished it around my son’s second birthday.
TM: So being the mother of a young child doesn’t have to kill your writing, does it?
HG: No. I’ve always had a day job, so right now being a mother is my day job -- which is a much nicer day job.
TM: Tell me about the other day jobs.
HG: I worked as a secretary at a law firm for many years Very stressful. And I worked as a speechwriter for the Parks Department -- a great job, I really liked that. I worked in a drug treatment center for a while, administering a grant at Samaritan Village in Queens. I worked at school for crafts in Maine for a few months because I had to get out of New York for a while. I worked in a hotel in Maine.
TM: You wrote another essay that was about what we’re talking about right here -- that you have to fit the writing into the life, and you can accomplish a lot by doing a little bit of something every day.
HG: It’s true. I have much more faith than I used to that things will get done. I used to really worry about it a lot. But now, if I don’t finish something one day, then I’ll finish it the next day. That comes partly from being a parent, too. You see that your kid gradually acquires skills.
TM: So you’ve got to have the long view. That’s what novel-writing is, isn’t it?
HG: Yeah.
TM: Are you working on another novel?
HG: Yeah. I haven’t had a lot of time to work on it lately, and I’m dying to work on it. It’s much lighter in tone that this one. It’s a comic novel, I’d say. [Laughs.] That’s all I want to say.
TM: You’re living the dream. You’ve got a major New York publisher for your first novel. What would you say to young people like yourself who are struggling to do it?
HG: One of my mentors told me that everything takes longer than you expect, even if you have what you think of as a realistic expectation. I never thought I was going to publish in my 20s, or even my early-30s, but it still did take longer than I thought. I would keep that in mind. Also, the culture’s really focused on making money. You have to ignore it and think of enjoying your life, enjoying learning how to write better, enjoying reading, enjoying meeting interesting people, enjoying movies, listening to music, whatever inspires you. In New York it was hard, especially in my early-30s. A lot of my friends were finishing graduate degrees and going on to professional careers -- not necessarily in writing, but as doctors and lawyers, and they had a very specific role. And I really didn’t. It’s hard.
TM: And fiction is becoming almost a boutique operation.
HG: It is. I guess it depends on your personality. For me, I’m barely breaking even, so I’ve decided it’s not worth worrying about. Writing is gratifying on a daily basis. If I didn’t love doing it, I would have stopped a long time ago.

The Russian language is the real hero of Tolstoy's masterpiece; it is his voice of truth. The English-speaking world is indebted to these two magnificent translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, for revealing more of its hidden riches than any who have tried to translate the book before. -- Orlando Figes
After reading their 2007 translation of War and Peace, Orlando Figes, the eminent Russian historian, did not mince words about Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. And so, neither will I: When I found out that I had the opportunity to interview the translators, I was giddy as a girlish Beatles fan circa 1964.
As the bestselling and award-winning translators of sixteen great works of Russian literature, Pevear and Volokhonsky are something of a rock star duo in the literary world. The fluency of their translations, grounded in a nuanced understanding of the time and place that the source texts were written, have given cause for many of us to fall more deeply in love with The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Notes from Underground, The Master and Margarita, Dead Souls, and the fiction of Anton Chekhov, among many others. The pair have been working together since 1986; Pevear has also published individual translations from French and Italian. As a duo, they were twice awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. Their 2004 translation of Anna Karenina was an Oprah’s Book Club pick.
The couple, who are married and live in Paris, added a new title to their oeuvre just last month: The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories, by Leo Tolstoy. The collection includes eleven glittering and strange tales, among them "The Kreutzer Sonata," "Master and Man," "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," and the novella Hadji Murat, which was Tolstoy’s final work. While Pevear and Volokhonsky have previously translated the short fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, and Nikolai Gogol, this is their first turn at the stories of Tolstoy. The ones they’ve chosen are largely from Tolstoy’s later years; together, the stories wrestle with questions of war, honor, death, sex, obsession, resentment, redemption, crime, and innocence. Seven of the stories collected were never published in Tolstoy’s lifetime.
So how do they do it? Pevear and Volokhonsky are candid about their tag-team approach to translation. Volokhonsky, a native speaker of Russian, pores over the original text first and creates a transliterated draft marked with her comments about the author’s literary style. Pevear, who does not read Russian, works from that draft to polish the English text, discussing pressing questions that emerge along the way with Volokhonsky. Should any disagreements emerge, Pevear makes the call. As Volokhonsky recently toldJeffrey Tractenberg in the Wall Street Journal:
Richard is a native speaker of English. I'm a native speaker of Russian. My task is to explain to Richard what is happening in the Russian text. Then it is up to him to do what he can. The final word is always his. I can say this is not quite what the Russian says. Either he finds something that satisfies me or he says no, this is how we're going to do it. We discuss endlessly and sometimes it becomes a nuisance because we return to it again and again even after the manuscript goes off. But we really don't quarrel. It would be much more interesting if we did.
Pevear and Volokhonsky do agree, however, to refrain from using contemporary expressions in their translations, choosing to remain faithful to the style of the novel’s time. Their current project? A translation of Boris Pasternak'sDoctor Zhivago.
In kind with their team approach, Pevear and Volokhonsky approached this email interview for The Millions as a pair.
The Millions: Your newest translation together is The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories. Why did you choose to do this particular book?
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: Quite simply because these later stories are among Tolstoy's greatest works. In fact, the short novel Hadji Murat is perhaps the finest thing he wrote, and he seems to have known it. After all his storming against the notion of beauty, he could not help himself, being a born artist, and "in secret from himself" (as he put it) wrote his most perfectly beautiful work – "beautiful" in the way that The Iliad is beautiful. "Master and Man" is also a perfect work of a very different sort, vividly told and deeply moving. But even the opening story of the collection, "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," which he wrote for a children's reading book in the simplest style possible, is gripping and unforgettable. How could we not want to translate them?
TM: Having also translated War and Peace and Anna Karenina, what have you found to be unique about how Leo Tolstoy worked in short fiction, compared to his novels?
RP and LV: Tolstoy's two big novels, like almost all of his work before 1880, portrayed people of his own class, the landed aristocracy, and their social milieu. Most often his heroes were self-conscious men, seekers of the meaning of life – in other words, self-portraits to one degree or another. In his later stories, there is much more variety: one hero is a narrow-minded bureaucrat, another is a well-to-do peasant, still another is a sort of holy fool, and finally there is the Chechen chief Hadji Murat. "The Forged Coupon" portrays people from all levels of Russian society, from the tsar to the lowest criminal. And there is a corresponding variety of "worlds." That's one thing. Another is the effort Tolstoy made to rid his art of what he considered the "superfluous detail" of the novels. His compositions became tighter, more formal, without losing any of the sensual immediacy that was the essence of his art.
TM: What are the greatest misconceptions about Tolstoy?
RP and LV: The greatest misconception might come from believing what Tolstoy said about his artistic work after his "conversion to true Christianity," as he called it; that is, from believing what he preached in the series of tracts and polemical works he wrote after 1880. He was never able to practice what he preached. He remained a deeply divided and contradictory man all his life. And that nourished his artistic work. We took a phrase from W. B. Yeats as the epigraph for our introduction to Anna Karenina: "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." That is even more true of Tolstoy in his later works, because his inner quarrel was more intense. "The Kreutzer Sonata" was meant to teach a lesson about the evils of modern marriage, but it does something quite different and humanly much more complex. Another misconception is that Tolstoy only wrote those two huge, unreadable novels.
TM: Together, you've worked your way through some of the greatest fiction ever written. What are the unique pressures you have as translators of fiction that is both beloved and so highly regarded?
RP and LV: The pressure comes more from the quality of the writing itself. There are two questions that it might seem quite proper for a translator to keep in mind, but that in fact will spoil the translation. The first is, "What will the reader think?" And the second is, "How do we say that in English?" A good writer does what he or she has to do in the writing so that it "goes right," as Robert Frost put it. There is at least as much intuition as intention in the process. A good translator has to follow that process far more consciously than the writer and yet come as close as possible in the new language to the instinctive "rightness" of the original. The greater the writer, the closer you want to come. That is both the challenge and the joy of it. But exactly what that "rightness" is remains undefinable, which is why there is no such thing as a definitive translation.
TM: Only about three percent of books published in the U. S. are in translation; the rate is even lower for translated fiction. What do you make of these numbers?
RP and LV: There are a number of things that might be made of them. The percentages are much higher in Europe, of course – 12% in Germany, 15% in France, 24% in Spain. We might say that that's because Europe is small, a sort of family of countries, despite all past wars and present rivalries. And so translation comes naturally, like overhearing a conversation in the next room. But the analogy doesn't quite work, because Europeans also translate a great deal of American writing and writing from all over the world. And Russia, which is a rather large country, has always given great importance to literary translation and has produced many superb translators. Is it American insularity, then? A lack of curiosity about what happens elsewhere? But what about the statistics for Great Britain? Surprisingly, they are about the same as for the U. S. Which suggests a linguistic insularity specific to English itself: if you speak the language of the hegemony, why notice the babble going on around you? It might also be a question of the market and marketing. Americans read an enormous amount of junk, which is dutifully supplied to them by publishers – unless it is actually the publishers who create the taste for junk. In either case, publishers are not likely to pay for the rights to translate junk and turn over a good percentage of the book's earnings to the original publisher. They tend to pick up the small number of books that win the major European prizes, hoping that the momentary notoriety will create a market among more discerning readers with a minimum of advertising. But, on the positive side, we do have publishers who have consistently gone against the market statistics and made a point of publishing translations: Dalkey Archive Press, for instance, and first of all New Directions. Among major publishers, Knopf, Vintage, and Everyman's Library, who publish most of our translations, are the exception that proves the rule.
TM: Your translations have achieved immense acclaim and success. Particularly in context of the low numbers of translations in the U. S., as well as the many other versions available of some of the books you work on, what is it about your translations that resonates with readers?
RP and LV: We're the last people who can answer that question.
TM: Russian or otherwise, who are the writers you'd most love to see translated into English? What books are U. S. publishers and readers lacking?
RP and LV: There are three fine Italian writers of the twentieth century who should be translated into English: Alberto Savinio, Cristina Campo, and Guido Ceronetti. A very few of Savinio's many books have been translated and gone out of print. One book by Ceronetti (who is still living) was published by Farrar, Straus in 1993. No English translations of Campo have been published as far as we know. Then there is the French poet Jacques Darras, who is incidentally a major translator from English. Some of his more scholarly books have been translated, but not his remarkable poetry and artistic prose. And there is the fine essayist and “culturologist” Sergei Averintsev, one of the most important Russian thinkers of recent times, a brilliant and witty writer. A few of his essays have been translated into English, but nothing like the substantial collections available in Italian, German, and French (the French publisher Cerf has recently commissioned a translation of Averintsev’s complete works).
TM: What books have you decided not to translate, and why?
RP and LV: We have decided not to translate Turgenev, because not everyone can be Mrs. [Constance] Garnett.
TM: Does contemporary literature lack the deep engagement the Russians had with the mysteries of life, like the existence of God and the meaning of death? If so, why do you think this is and what is lost?
RP and LV: These questions are very difficult to talk about or even to formulate correctly. They lead to glittering generalities that are almost certain to be wrong. But we might say tentatively that the qualities we find in nineteenth century Russian literature came in part from the late maturing of Russian culture, which reached its "golden age" not in the time of Shakespeare or Molière or Cervantes, but in the age of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. These writers belonged fully to the nineteenth century, with all its social and spiritual conflicts, but at the same time they were creating the language and the forms of their literature, and posing these "accursed questions," as Dostoevsky called them, for the first time. There is a primary energy in their work. As for what may have been lost, writers themselves have little choice about these things; they are determined by forces much larger than the individual will. Besides, what is lost here is found there.
TM: What is the social resonance of Tolstoy's ideas today? Why do we keep turning back to him?
RP and LV: There are people all over the world who are still taken with Tolstoy's social ideas – that is, with "Tolstoyism," as he and his followers defined it: the radical simplification of life, egalitarianism, non-violent opposition to the state, pacifism, vegetarianism, post-marital chastity. But that's probably not what you mean by "Tolstoy's ideas." We turn back to him, we keep reading him, because in his artistic work he deals with universal conditions and almost never with topical issues, and because he has such an extraordinary gift for concrete realization.
TM: Judging by your output, you both seem to work so much and so efficiently. Do you have time to read for pure enjoyment? If so, what have you read recently that you have loved?
RP and LV: Dorothy Sayers' mystery novels, Don Quixote in Liubimov's Russian translation, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, the essays of Eliot Weinberger (Oranges and Peanuts for Sale and An Elemental Thing), the journals of Kornei Chukovsky, Guido Ceronetti'sLa Pazienza dell'arrostito (The Patience of the Roasted), Martin Chuzzlewit...

I got shingles, I lost the ability to feed myself. But it’s expected. It happens to every writer at some point in the process. It’s actually kind of heartening to be like, “This will kill you, or come close.”

Anyone who believes that you can make art from language is part of a small, nearly-vanishing community, and we should all form a wedge and march on the enemy. Do we need different uniforms in this struggle, different stripes on our arms so that it’s clear who the realists are? Maybe, but I care less and less.